I'm generally not interested in baseball, but there's just something about these two teams that intrigues me.

Anyway, another classy example of New Yorkers tonight. A Yankee player purposefully knocks the ball out of a Sox player's glove while running to first base, which resulted in an error and a run scored for the Yankees to narrow the gap to 4-3, Sox lead. The officiating crew got the call right, determining that the runner was out due to interference. Yankee fans proceed to throw baseballs all over the field and chant "********." :rolleyes: :shakehead:

Lord Helmet

10-19-2004, 11:23 PM

Go RedSox!!!!!

Reverse the curse!! :laugh:

Anthem

10-19-2004, 11:24 PM

I'd love to see the Yankees lose.

Shade

10-19-2004, 11:27 PM

The Red Sox are on the verge of becoming the only team in MLB history to force a Game 7 after being down 3-0. Wouldn't it be something if they could complete the backdoor sweep? Now THAT would be a way to reverse the curse! :eek:

Btw, I believe that feat has only been accomplished in the NHL, a couple of times. I know it's never been done in the NBA.

Lord Helmet

10-19-2004, 11:29 PM

The Red Sox are on the verge of becoming the only team in MLB history to force a Game 7 after being down 3-0. Wouldn't it be something if they could complete the backdoor sweep? Now THAT would be a way to reverse the curse! :eek:

Btw, I believe that feat has only been accomplished in the NHL, a couple of times. I know it's never been done in the NBA.

Yea I'm pretty sure your right that it has only been done in the NHL.In the NBA it has never ever been done.

Shade

10-19-2004, 11:32 PM

Here they go again. The fans disagree with a very close call, more stuff comes flying onto the field. Everytime it happens, they have to pull the players into the bullpen for safety reasons. Morons.

obnoxiousmodesty

10-19-2004, 11:33 PM

I really am not a fan of baseball at all, but I have genuinely enjoyed the ALCS. I've missed nary a pitch all series. Curt Schilling's performance tonight in Game 6 is nothing short of magnificent.

I dare not count myself a Red Sox fan as that would be insulting to their die-hard fans; however, I am definitely wishing them the very best.

God those Yankee fans are pathetic they cry and thow stuff onto the field after every call that doesn't go their way.I really hope the RedSox can smash them.The Yank fans are making it unsafe to even be on the field. :unimpressed: They have had to make like 2 or 3 announcements over the PA.

Shade

10-19-2004, 11:35 PM

Now the police are involved. Priceless. :laugh: :shakehead:

Lord Helmet

10-19-2004, 11:38 PM

They had to get police in riot gear to line the stands.Man the Yankee fans are representing their team well :unimpressed: GO REDSOX!

Shade

10-19-2004, 11:46 PM

It all comes down to the bottom of the ninth now, Boston leading 4-2. Is there anyone out there who believes that the Yankees WON'T come back and win this game?

Shade

10-19-2004, 11:49 PM

The police have left the field! Let the rioting begin! :rolleyes:

Shade

10-20-2004, 12:04 AM

Red Sox win, 4-2. Game 7 coming up. Wow.

I have the feeling that the Sox are just being set up for another huge disappointment.

Lord Helmet

10-20-2004, 12:04 AM

REDSOX FORCE GAME 7!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lord Helmet

10-20-2004, 12:07 AM

Red Sox win, 4-2. Game 7 coming up. Wow.

I have the feeling that the Sox are just being set up for another huge disappointment.
Yea I know.After being the 1st team in the history to be down 0-3 to force game 7 that will be a major disappointment.I hope not.

efx

10-20-2004, 12:15 AM

That was pretty dumb the way those fans acted but I don't they they're indicative of the fanbase as a whole.

BostonConnection

10-20-2004, 12:17 AM

All I can say is - unbelievable. :cool:

Just when you think this series is over, just when you think that it can't get more tense and nail-biting, damn if the tension doesn't ratchet up another notch.

Almost as fun as watching basketball...;)

efx

10-20-2004, 12:18 AM

It's fun though :) I don't see how anyone could not enjoy this!

obnoxiousmodesty

10-20-2004, 12:22 AM

Awesome game. I can't wait 'til Game 7.

efx

10-20-2004, 12:32 AM

I'm generally not interested in baseball, but there's just something about these two teams that intrigues me.

Anyway, another classy example of New Yorkers tonight.

Do you have something against people from New York or what? Personally I don't give a crap but I've seen alot of new york generalizations from you on this board.

Stryder

10-20-2004, 08:01 AM

Shade, a vast and sweeping generalization, eh?

Geez.

Slick Pinkham

10-20-2004, 08:32 AM

Simply the greatest comeback in the history of sports, if the Red Sox take game 7 tonight.

Maybe the greatest comeback in human history since Lazarus.

:cool:

I'd hate to be a Yankee called into Steinbrenner's office tomorrow if they lose tonight.

My avatar is to remind you that it is all tied up.

Gyron

10-20-2004, 10:06 AM

Just keep reminding us Pacertom!

And I have to agree, I am not really a baseball fan, but I have been enthralled win this series. Don't know why, but its been fun to watch.

And I have to say, I'm cheering for the Sox.

For some reason, I equate the NY Yankees with the Lakers that we all hate in the NBA. There's a certain degree of cockiness on the yankees part that I just don't like I guess.

efx

10-20-2004, 12:04 PM

Gyron, take a look at the players of the yankees. Now compare them to the bo-sox players. Are you saying Martinez, Ramirez and Ortiz are not cocky and don't act that way? Please.

These are two very confident teams and they both act that way.

Kstat

10-20-2004, 12:10 PM

efx- give it up, you of ALL people should know that no team from NY shall ever be shown in a positive light on PD. I believe its a forum rule somewhere, let me look it up for you...

efx

10-20-2004, 12:26 PM

I know dude :) But I'm a persistent mf and if I see something that I disagree with I'll argue it.

But I'm starting to think my time could be better spent.

Slick Pinkham

10-20-2004, 01:14 PM

Gyron, take a look at the players of the yankees. Now compare them to the bo-sox players. Are you saying Martinez, Ramirez and Ortiz are not cocky and don't act that way? Please.

These are two very confident teams and they both act that way.

I agree! Except for pretty-boy A-Rod (who we REALLY wanted in Boston) the Yankees are not particularly hateable. Well, maybe add in the 'roided up duo of Sheffield and Giambi.

It's the Yankees FANS that really irk me and other Red Sox fans. Maybe not you, and certainly not all of them.

We work with them. They live among us. They believe in a certain entitilement. They will win because they always win and that fact improves their own sense of self-worth.

I can respect any Yankees fan who was as avid a fan in the doldrums of the 80's, when Don Mattingly and company could never win anything.

I can't respect the hangers-on, who glom onto them because they are likely to win.

In that respect they are the opposite of Red Sox fans. There is no bandwagon. It's the anti-bandwagon. Come root for the team that is ALWAYS one of the 5 best teams in the league but nevertheless always loses in bizarre, disasterous, even Shakespearian ways.

efx

10-20-2004, 01:25 PM

Pacertom, I agree with you! It's like the lakers/bulls fans of the 90's that climbed on so to speak.

It's just "hard" being a yankee fan because you're always the target of people who claim you're a bandwagoner and so forth.

I just like the yankees because Jeter is my favorite baseball player. It's as simple as that. Just like I became a Pacer fan because of Reggie. I would not be less of a fan if either of these aforementioned teams lost.

And being a pacer fan I'm sure we all can relate to that!

But you make a good point.

Imagine that, a yankee and a red sox fan having a civilized discussion! :D

Let's roll with that and just enjoy sports for what it is. Entertainment.

Gyron

10-20-2004, 02:01 PM

I don't dislike NY fans or teams whatso ever. I also didn't say I hated the yankees. I said their is a certain cockiness that I seemed to sense in them.

Being a baseball outsider, thats just what I've witnessed in the last couple days of watching.

I admit that they have one hell of a team and organization, I just said I equate it to the same general feeling that I get when watching the Lakers.

And personally no, I have not noticed while Ihave been watching in the last 6 games that feeling of cockiness from the sox. Its not to say it isn't there, maybe I just don't know the players weel enough to see it. As I said, these are the ONLY baseball games I have watched all year.

I will say the one yankee that I am impressed with is Matsuei. It just looks like to me that he comes to go to work. Seems like everytime you see him, he's just emotionless and there to do his job, and he seems to do it well.

Jeter and A Rod I am not as impressed. They are both great players, its just something in how they hold themselves. Don't know....Oh well, I'm definitely not going to argue any further over a sport I don't know a lot about.

And as for the Anti New York Bias, thats BS. Yes I do not care for the Knicks, and I just expressed a little bit of a feeling about the yankees, but it is defnitely not just because they are from New York.

My Dad is from New York, and as funny as this maybe, if there was one team in NY that I would cheer for, it would be the buffalo bills. I grew up watching my dad obsess over that team, through the good and the bad(always seems there is more bad with that team, HAHA).

Slick Pinkham

10-20-2004, 02:43 PM

the sports guy chimes in:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/041020

**FILED AT 3:30 AM, WEDNESDAY MORNING**

Blank screen.

I'm staring at a blank screen.

(Come on ... type something ... )

What can you say? What can you say about Curt Schilling? How many words are enough? 500? 2,000? 10,000? This wasn't just an ankle sprain. His right sock was covered in blood, thanks to three sutures (!?!?!?!) holding together his dislocated ankle tendon. In Game 1, that same tendon was popping. This time it was leaking blood. He didn't care. The team needed him.

So Schilling kept pitching. Put his career on the line. Gritted through the next three hours at Yankee Stadium -- seven innings, 25 batters, 99 pitches in all. Won the game. Kept the team alive. Hugged everyone in the dugout when he was cooked. Stuck in a dip, sat back and waited for the ESPN Classic royalties to start pouring in.

It was that good. Win or lose on Wednesday night, the Schilling Game takes its place alongside the Willis Reed Game, MJ's Flu Game, Bird banging his head against the Pacers and everything else in the Sheer Guts Pantheon. Sitting in the dugout between innings, he threw a towel over his head and stared at the ground, hands pressed against his ears, looking like someone who just finished a harrowing plane flight. All he needed was a barf bag and the cast of "Lost" standing behind him.

ONE FINE DAY
It might be hard to believe -- but we've got another Sox-Yanks Game 7 on our hands. And this one could change everything.
I don't know how he did it. There was nothing different about his situation from Game 1, other than the O.J. sock, the sutures and the hands of God (his words, not mine). The Red Sox made a big deal about this "emergency boot" from Reebok, a device that would stabilize Schilling's damaged ankle tendon, but I'm starting to wonder if they bought that device on eBay from Sidd Finch and the Easter Bunny. Schilling didn't even wear it. This was about heart. This was about coming through when it mattered most. This was about choosing to pitch for a tortured franchise, promising that things would be different, and then perservering only because you gave your word.

Over the next few days, everyone will make a big deal about Schilling's Game 6, only some for the right reasons. We live in a sports world where every good moment gets beaten into the ground. It isn't enough for something to happen anymore. You have to vote. You have to watch two guys screaming on a split-screen. You have to read 400 columns, then columns by people reviewing those columns. You have to hear sports radio hosts screaming, and once the subject becomes exhausted, one of them takes a crazy angle on the topic just to keep the phone lines ringing for another hour. It keeps going and going, a vicious little snowball. When it runs out of steam, something else replaces it, and the whole cycle starts all over again.

Schilling's recipe for success: A lot of heart, some sutures and the hand of God.
I don't want the Schilling Game to fall into that. I don't want to hear someone claiming that he "wasn't that hurt," or that it "doesn't matter if they don't win Game 7," or even that Schilling was "milking the moment." You're not taking this away from me. This was even better than Pedro coming out of the bullpen five years ago in Cleveland, and I never thought I would say that about any Red Sox pitcher.

In my three decades of following Boston sports, my favorite underrated performance belongs to Kevin McHale, who limped around on a broken foot for two straight months in the 1987 playoffs. The doctors explained the risks to him: If he kept playing, there was a chance his foot would never be the same. He would never get the same lift again. That's what they told him. He didn't care. They were the defending champs. They needed him. So he played. He was never quite the same. Years later, when he was asked about the decision, McHale explained that you only have so many chances to win a championship, so you do what you have to do. It's that simple.

Even though Schilling was at a different point of his career, the mindset remains the same. After you win one, you just want to get back there .. even with a popping ankle tendon, with a suture leaking blood, with 46-degree weather making your legs quiver, with the hopes of an entire region resting on your back. Schilling risked his career and came through. Sometimes in sports, we have a tendency to remember the scarring moments and forget the great ones. I just hope we don't forget this one. Even when people are screamingon a split-screen.
(We'll be back on the "Sports Reporters" after this.)

So what happens Wednesday night? I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I haven't slept in four days. My back feels like Schilling rammed his protective shoe against it. Even my jaw is sore -- from chewing gum like a madman during Game 5. The classic move would be for the Sox to come back, win three games in a row, then lose the climactic 7th game. But this isn't a classic Red Sox team. The old Red Sox would have blown Game 4 or Game 5, and they definitely would have choked in Game 6. With the old Red Sox, Bellhorn's homer gets ruled a double, A-Rod definitely gets called safe at first base, and Miguel Cairo clears the bases for the game-winner in the ninth.

Here's the point: Those things haven't been happening. Sometimes you pass a point where history becomes a factor -- like with the Patriots three years ago, when the diehards kept waiting for the Other Shoe to drop, and we were waiting and waiting, and suddenly Vinatieri's final kick split the uprights, the most liberating feeling you can imagine. That's the thing about baggage as a sports fan -- you can shed this stuff. You just need a few breaks. This Boston team is getting them.

I'm not making any predictions. I'm not even trying to be coherent. Just remember the following things heading into the game:

1. In less than 24 hours, you could be hearing someone say the following sentence: "So the Red Sox completed the most dramatic comeback in baseball history rallying from three games to zero to defeat the New York Yankees and make the World Series, where they'll be facing off against Roger Clemens and the Houston Astros in Game 1."

2. If the roles were reversed, Red Sox Nation would be having a collective coronary right now. Repeat: Coronary. I can't imagine what New York is like. And the thought of Steinbrenner's potential reaction to the biggest choke in sports history ... I mean, even if you're NOT a Red Sox fan, you have to be rooting for this, right? Couldn't you see him having Cashman drawn and quartered before the Winter Meetings?

3. You could make a case that this Yankee team has more pressure tonight than any baseball team in recent memory -- not only will they be the guys who finally lost to the Red Sox, they will be the guys who choked away a 3-0 lead. Meanwhile, this Red Sox team is still playing with the house's money. It's an interesting role reversal, although the end result is that I'm still peeing blood either way.

4. My editor Brick points this out: If the Sox pull this off, for the foreseeable future, every time you're watching a playoff series (in any sport) where someone's up 3-0 and they show the "Teams that have come back from 3-0" graphic, they will feel obliged to mention the 2004 Red Sox. The moment will live on. And on. And on.

The t-shirt guys in Boston are printing up "A-Fraud" as we speak.
5. This isn't the 1996-1999 Yankees. Only four guys remain from that team. You can only get away with relying on so many Tanyon Sturtze- and Tony Clark-types before it catches up with you. I keep telling myself this.

6. The Buckner-Armbrister flashback play in Game 6 clearly exposed A-Rod as a liar and cheater of the highest order -- the kind who would turn over an "R" in Scrabble and pretend it's a blank letter. Warrants mentioning.

7. If the Yankees are down by two runs in the ninth inning, and somebody walks -- like Matsui did in Game 6 -- apparently it's as good as a home run. That's how Tim McCarver explained it last night. I'm not sure if just the Yankees are immune to double plays, or if it's everyone in the league. But it's an interesting development.

8. I'm thinking that All-Star Game rules apply tonight -- everyone pitches a couple of innings for the Sox, nobody stays on the mound for too long. Eighteen years ago in Shea Stadium, faced with a similar situation, the always-incompetent John McNamara screwed things up, relieving Bruce Hurst with Calvin Schiraldi and Al Nipper when he could have used Oil Can Boyd and even Roger Clemens. Things will be different this time around. Say what you want about Terry Francona -- and I have -- but he's certainly been willing to bend the standard bullpen rules during this series, for better and worse.

9. If the Red Sox prevail against the Yankees and win the World Series, you will never have to read me whining about the travails of Red Sox fans again.

10. Read that last sentence again.

Bill Simmons is a columnist for Page 2 and ESPN The Magazine. His Sports Guy's World site is updated every day Monday through Friday.

ChicagoJ

10-20-2004, 04:49 PM

Tom, what's she going to do if the Sox win tonight? :o

Slick Pinkham

10-20-2004, 05:08 PM

Actually, Jay, she would have fit in nicely with last year's "COWBOY UP" theme.